The story that follows has been decades in the making. I’ve pieced together court reports, electronic records, newspaper articles, video recordings, letters – everything I could to make my account as close to the truth as possible. I’ve relied greatly on the words of the woman who destroyed my son’s life and then redeemed it: Harriet Kealty.

Harri strikes me as a lonely figure. Perhaps that’s what law enforcement does to a person. Maybe daily exposure to the violent, dishonest, and downright murderous makes trust a luxury? Perhaps that’s why police officers travel in packs, and end up socializing together.

She was thirty-one or thirty-two when she first met my son. She’d been born and raised in London, and spent her childhood living in a four-bedroom terraced house near Battersea Park. Harri was twenty when her mum died, and her father retired to Melbourne shortly after she joined the police force. He died a few years later. There were a couple of cousins, one on the Isle of Wight, the other in Toronto, and a brace of school friends who met her once a year for drinks, but beyond that, Harri was a loner. She didn’t keep a conventional diary, but every few days she would send herself a chatty email chronicling recent events. She kept the emails in a folder called ‘journal’ and as far as I can tell she never shared them with anyone. The emails read like round robins, and the fact she felt too isolated to share her news with anyone but herself fills me with sadness. I consider myself a voyeur trawling through her private recollections, but given her role in Elliot’s life this book wouldn’t have been possible without the intrusion. If I’ve wronged her, I hope she will forgive me.

I’ve been in two minds about sharing the trove that has enabled me to tell this story. They always say a magician should never reveal their secrets and I think the same is true of authors. If I hadn’t revealed my access to Harri’s emails, court records, and other histories, you might have thought me more imaginative, or a better storyteller, but I feel it is important you know I’m honest. I’ve traded mystery for accuracy. However much this diminishes your perception of me as a storyteller, you know that all I’m doing is colouring between the lines of reality.

Of all the books I’ve written, this is the most difficult. Not a page passes that I don’t think of my son, alone, described by the social workers who came to assess him as ‘troubled’, ‘withdrawn’ and ‘suspicious’. I long to reach out to my boy and hug him. I want to hold Elliot and make the pain go away. I want to tell him how sorry I am for abandoning him, to tell him how much I love him.

But I can’t.

And that eats at me.

I’m hollow.

I miss him so much.

But he’s gone.

Or rather, it’s me.

I’ve gone.